“I am widely regarded as the ghost of a writer, a ghost still visible, excessively solid of flesh and perhaps too ambulatory, but a writer remembered mostly for works which were staged between 1944 and 1961.”Tennessee Williams
The New York Times, May 8, 1977

When the playwright Tennessee Williams found Broadway success with the The Glass Menagerie in 1944 and A Streetcar Named Desire three years later he found himself at the pinnacle of success that few writers experience. Wouldn’t you love to go back to 1947 just for a moment and ask Mr. Williams what it was like to go through more a decade as a struggling writer to the top of the mountain? Well thanks to the Internet and Williams being a wordsmith we can discover what was going through his mind.

Four days before the opening of A Streetcar Named Desire (a play for which he would later be awarded the Pulitzer Prize) an essay he wrote was published in the New York Times called A Streetcar Named Success. He would later retitle the essay A Catastrophe of Success and have it published at the end of the New Direction version of The Glass Menagerie.

I first read that essay as part of an acting workshop in my early twenties which I think is an ideal time to encounter Williams’ thoughts. I hope you do take the world by storm with your writings. And if you do, at least Williams will have given you a warning.

“I was snatched out of virtual oblivion and thrust into sudden prominence, and from the precarious tenancy of furnished rooms about the country I was removed to a suite in a first-class Manhattan hotel. My experience was not unique. Success has often come that abruptly into the lives of Americans. The Cinderella story is our favorite national myth, the cornerstone of the film industry if not the Democracy itself. I have seen it enacted on the screen so often that I was now inclined to yawn at it, not with disbelief but with an attitude of Who Cares!”Tennessee Williams

Williams did not become a writer to become rich and famous, but that’s what happened. He appeared to be uncomfortable with the trappings. Of the way people treated him, and how he treated people.

“A well of cynicism rose in me. Conversations all sounded as if they had been recorded years ago and were being played back on a turn table. Sincerity and kindliness seemed to have gone out of my friends voices. I suspected them of hypocrisy. I stopped calling them, stopped seeing them. I was impatient of what I knew to be inane flattery. I got so sick of hearing people say, ‘I loved your play!’ that I could not say thank you any more.”Tennessee Williams

I’ve read that Olympic athletes after winning a gold medal that they have trained their entire life sometimes fall into a state of depression. Jon Krakauer touches on this theme in his book Into Thin Air writing about mountain climbers after they reach Mt. Everest. Williams was famous for writing every day—sometimes in eight hour stretches. I imagine along with his new-found fame there was much mental and physical exhaustion that he was experiencing (along with a family history of depression).

His cure? After having eye surgery, he “checked out of the handsome suite at the first class hotel, packed my papers and a few incidental belongings and left for Mexico, an elemental country where you can quickly forget the false dignities and conceits imposed by success.” And in Mexico he began work on a new play called The Poker Night.

When that play was completed it was called A Streetcar Named Desire and would star a new actor named Marlon Brando in the Broadway play and the Hollywood film. It’s hard to fathom that one writer could write The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire back to back. Much less a writer in his 30s who was relatively unknown before that.

Streetcar would put Williams even further into the spotlight and for the next 15 years he would continue to meet the high expectations of audiences and critics. But around age 50 the catastrophe of success would wrap its claws around Williams and not release him until it consumed his life. We’ll look at the final act of his life in part 2.

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100 percent of the screenwriters who now have agents at one time didn’t have an agent. 100 percent of screenwriters who are now working at one time weren’t working. 100 percent of the screenwriters who have made money at screenwriting at one time time didn’t made a dime.” Michael Hauge Writing Screenplays that Sells page […]